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Living Is Surviving: Causation, Reproduction and Semiosis

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Living Is Surviving: Causation, Reproduction and Semiosis 1 LIVING IS SURVIVING: CAUSATION, REPRODUCTION AND SEMIOSIS Eliseo Fernández Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology 5109 Cherry St. Kansas City, MO 64110, USA [email protected] ABSTRACT Since Darwin‘s appropriation of Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest,” differential survival has become the basis of explanatory accounts of biological evolution through natural selection. Beyond extrinsic survival (e.g., finding food, avoiding dangers, etc.), intrinsic survival demands continual internal repair and reconstruction to offset the effects of unrelenting internal decay and depletion. The organism must constantly re-produce the conditions of its own existence. The individual‘s survival is nevertheless subordinate to that of the species. The survival of the species is achieved through biological reproduction in the ordinary sense (i.e., assemblage of a working copy of the organism itself, capable of surviving and reproducing in turn.) In this contribution I attempt to explain how these two types of reproduction (i.e., for the survival of the individual and of the species) are related to other kinds of replication, such as the reproduction of a picture, of a melody, or of a movement. I believe all of these reproductive forms are based on a fundamental one, which is the condition of possibility of all forms of replication. This fundamental kind of reproduction resides in the spontaneous reproduction of events under physical causation. Since its inception in the 17th century, modern natural philosophy appeals to a scheme of causal explanation in which a physical system causally isolated from its surroundings is characterized by a quantitative description of its state during an arbitrarily short–term interval. When this set of particular, contingent determinations (initial conditions) are injected as inputs into mathematical functions known as laws of nature, any future state of the system can be computed in principle. Every time we are able to reproduce sufficiently similar initial conditions nature spontaneously and automatically reproduces sufficiently similar future states. This modern conception of physical causation replaced the medieval Aristotelian view based on the idea of powers or capacities, inherent in things of a common nature, ready to be enacted upon the occurrence of well-defined triggering conditions. I try to show that these different causality conceptions are not 2 incompatible but, on the contrary, Peirce’s conception of habit makes possible their synthesis into a more general notion, which is well suited to the needs of biosemiotics and biology in general. In the spirit of current accounts of causation in terms of powers or dispositions, I propose a thermodynamic interpretation of physical causality. On this basis I advance an interpretation of semiosis as a type of second-order causation: at the level of biosemiotic transactions, semiosis acts by altering habits embodied in the constraints that in turn causally determine the extent and direction of physical changes. Finally, I indicate some commonality between the present proposals and the work of a variety of investigators who use top-down thermodynamic notions in different fields of research through the application of the principle of maximum entropy production. LIVING IS SURVIVING: CAUSATION, REPRODUCTION AND SEMIOSIS The great contradictions which man discovers in himself – freedom and necessity, autonomy and dependence, self and world, relation and isolation, creativity and morality – have their rudimentary traces in even the most primitive forms of life, each precariously balanced between being and not-being, and each already endowed with an internal horizon of “transcendence”. 1 Neurath’s ship and the ship of Theseus In this contribution I attempt to explain how two different types of biological reproduction (for the survival of the individual and of the species) are related to other kinds of replication, such as the reproduction of a picture, a melody, a movement, or a gesture. I conjecture that all forms of reproduction are based on a fundamental one that resides in the spontaneous reproduction of events under physical causation. Next, I develop in a purely impressionistic manner (with no pretensions of formal rigor or demonstration) a perspective on the relations between semiosis and physical causation that may have heuristic value for biosemiotics. This high-level, informal argumentation, partially based on Peirce’s ideas, is supported by illustrative images and metaphors that may have intuitive appeal. 3 Since Darwin‘s appropriation of Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest,” the expression has become nearly synonymous with natural selection in textbook treatments of biological evolution. In these accounts, survival is tacitly equated to external survival: competition, procurement of energy sources, avoidance of dangers, etc. Meanwhile, twentieth-century developments in biology cast a new light on the meaning of survival. Through the strictures of the second law of thermodynamics we now realize that survival is not merely one among the manifold activities in which organisms engage. On the contrary, vivere est supervivere: the act of survival and the act of living are coextensive. To survive — from its Latin roots super (above) + vivere (to live) — is to actively stay afloat in the sea of life. In what we may call internal survival, the entire functional orchestration of physical and chemical activities transpiring at every instant within every organism aim to maintain, repair and replace structures that need to be continuously rebuilt against unrelenting deterioration and decay. An organism is ever at the brink of death, even when at perfect peace with its environment. Every vital function or mechanism at work within an organism is permanently engaged in the service of individual survival, unless it is at the service of reproduction i.e., the survival of the species. Survival of the fittest means survival of the successful reproducers. The perpetuation of the form takes precedence over that of the individual. Science and folklore afford innumerable examples of the immolation of parents for their offspring, including altruistic suicide of sterile members of insect colonies to save the reproducers, suicidal mating, and many others. Apoptosis and other forms of programmed cell death show the extent to which the non-survival of individuals is instrumental to the survival of multicellular systems and species. Otto Neurath aptly characterized the life of science with a famous metaphor: science is like a boat that must be continuously rebuilt while remaining afloat.2 This trope is equally applicable to life in general, when we consider the continuous re-production and replacement of the organism’s parts that must be achieved without interrupting the metabolic and reproductive cycles. 4 There is another nautical simile that is relevant to this issue. Plutarch told the story of the ship of Theseus, which was kept indefinitely afloat by the replacement of decayed planks by new ones until none of the original parts were left. The question whether the ship remains the same one or becomes a new, different ship sparked one of the paradoxes of identity that have exercised philosophers since antiquity to the present. Since we the inquirers happen to be multicellular organisms and most of our cells are periodically replaced every few years, I feel inclined to side with the Aristotelian answer to this paradox and consider that we remain our same selves thanks to the survival of the formal cause. In modern terms, this means that the invariance and continuity of the cyclic processes, causes and effects that keep us alive in spite of thermodynamic degradation constitutes our identity. The formal cause is a temporal, relational structure that persists unaffected by the coming and going of material parts until trauma or senescence leads to its dissolution. The ship of Theseus sinks at the end but — in successful reproducers — not without first building working replicas of the mother ship, using materials obtained onboard. At present numerous authors in the philosophy of biology agree that the essential attributes of life include functional autonomy and self-reproduction. Biosemiotics adds a third one: semiosis or semiotic causation. These three attributes partake of a common trait, that of having an essential self-referential structure. Autonomy (auto: self + nomos: law) and self-reproduction show their self-referential credentials on their etymological components. I have called attention to the self-referential nature of semiosis in previous contributions (see e.g. Fernandez 2009, 2010). John Collier characterizes autonomy ably and tersely: Autonomous systems, as with autopoietic systems (deriving from "self- producing"), both produce their own governance, and use that governance to maintain themselves. A system is autonomous if and only if the organization of internal aspects of system processes is the dominant factor in the system’s self-preservation, making both itself and the processes that contribute to autonomy functional. […] It is worth noting that autonomy is [an] organizational property constituted of process[es] with some degree of closure, though the closure to external influences need not be complete (Collier 2002). 5 Autonomy is thus intimately related to the functions that insure internal survival, (i.e., of the continuous and recursive re-production of the conditions required for maintaining life as a process). In this sense organisms—and
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